


These Endless Days (Are Finally Ending in a Blaze)

by Pollydoodles



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-15
Updated: 2017-09-10
Packaged: 2018-09-17 18:09:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 18,105
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9336674
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pollydoodles/pseuds/Pollydoodles
Summary: Following the events of Civil War, the Avengers are disbanded, scattered and in hiding - and not coping all that well. The rise of anti-superhuman feeling continues, and it's not only the Avengers who are feeling the effects. Steve Rogers and team are about to discover a whole other world, and with it comes what might be the biggest threat they've ever faced.





	1. Whispers From the Hellmouth

**Author's Note:**

> With thanks and deep gratitude to Latessitrice, without whom this wouldn't be half the story it (hopefully) will come to be.

Sunnydale (or what’s left of it), 2015. 

 

The wind is gentle in the severe heat of the afternoon.

It’s not enough to sway the humidity. 

Not nearly enough. 

The few bare trees that dot the landscape are dry, and tired. They are twisted into unnatural shapes, and he thinks, as he watches them idly from behind his shades and through the open window of the jeep as it rolls through the wasteland, that it must be a result of the supernatural destruction this place has suffered. 

The tyres crunch over the dust that’s left. Even thirteen years after the fact, nothing grows in this place. Even the goddamn sign is no longer standing, and he spits, disgusted, through the open window. The spittle hits the dirt and mingles, not long for this world in the unforgiving sun that beats down upon it.

Beads of sweat collect at the base of his short cropped hair, rolling with excruciating slowness from the shaved bristles and under the starched collar of the shirt that he’s wearing. The man grimaces, but does not move to swipe at the sweat tracks. Instead he shifts in his seat, the leather creaking under his weight as he does so.

The barren landscape continues to roll past. 

The small convoy approaches the edge of the crater, the only thing that’s really left of the damn place, and it rolls to a halt. He sighs, adjusting his jacket, and opens the door. The other jeeps come to a halt at either side, small dust clouds whirling in the air as the brakes protest. Boots hitting the ground, he repositions the sunglasses on his nose, which wrinkles.

Figures emerge from the other vehicles, and hands snap to attention in sharp salutes as his indifferent gaze glances across at them. There is a chorus of murmured greeting; formal, stiffly given, as he slams the car door. The polished sides of the jeep are coated in dust, sand and yellowing dirt wedged within the tread of the tyres.

“Sir, General Ross, sir.”

He ignores them. 

Striding forward, suit jacket flapping slightly in the bare breeze as he moves, he steps up to the crater edge and peers across. He can barely see to the other side, so wide is it. Surveying the landscape, desolated and empty as it is, his face hardens behind the sunglasses perched on it. Another pair of shoes, more expensive, hardly made for trekking across the remnants of an old town, step up next to the boots already stood at the edge of the crater. 

They are highly polished.

The owner makes no move to speak, waiting, perhaps, for the first to speak. 

General Ross spits, hard, once more. He cannot see where it lands this time, expelling it with force that takes it into the crater. “Makes me sick,” he says, voice a low growl that echoes in the silence of what was once the town of Sunnydale. One hand sweeps dismissively over the ragged hole in the earth that stretches almost as far as the eye can see. 

“Whole town, devastated, on the whim of a child.”

The shoes next to him shift. Though Ross’ are covered with a fine coat of dust and dirt, the other’s shoes are just as clean as they were when they first stepped up next to him. The owner of the shoes makes a noise of agreement, and Ross scowls again, taking the glasses off and squinting across remains of Sunnydale. 

“These … Superhumans,” the other voice considers, words measured and somehow quiet even in the comparative silence that surrounds them. There is little reverence attached to the word ‘superhumans’. Ross snorts. “They can’t be allowed to run free. Imagine the damage they could wreak on the world.” 

Ross makes a noise of agreement himself, shading his eyes with one hand. He kicks idly at a stone, watches as it tumbles forward and pauses. It rocks, almost as though it can’t decide whether to let itself fall or fight to stay on its ledge. The other voice continues, the shoes shifting once more, the owner moving to stand directly behind Ross. 

“That they’ve already inflicted. New York. London. Sokovia.”

The other voice lists off as the stone rolls forward, looks for all the world as though it will fall over the edge and into the crater and be lost forever. That it has no choice but to do so. Somehow, improbably, it hovers, caught in its motion and able still to recover itself. 

The other shoes, still shining bright under the midday sun, pause themselves as they pace behind Ross. They stand, now, directly behind the man. The voice hesitates, then continues in what is barely above a whisper. 

“They must be controlled.” 

The stone trembles on its ledge. The shoes cross to the other side of Ross, clean still against his own dust covered boots. 

“Stopped.”

The stone falls.


	2. A New Threat

Istanbul, 2017

 

The apartment is small. 

Too small, really, for two people - and they have five squashed into the tiny space. It’s seen better days - and a lot of them, too. Sam wakes up daily to stare, from his position flat on his back on ancient blankets stretched across even older floorboards, at the cracks in the ceiling and the odd stains that dance across it. He wonders, in the times when he’s feeling less than generous about Steve rescuing them from the Raft, why it is that they - the heroes of the piece - have to be holed up in the world’s smallest apartment, when Barnes - a murderer many times over - is getting the best treatment possible in Wakanda. 

Sam knows he’s not being entirely fair when those thoughts flit across his mind in the early hours, when the sleepy dawn light starts to poke through the broken shutters of the fifth story windows. He knows, academically speaking, that Barnes was beaten, brainwashed, and set on his course. But when he’s staring down at watery soup and the only meat he’s seen for the last month has come from the inside of a particularly suspect tin can, it’s easy to blame the grumble in his stomach on Steve’s so-called best friend. 

Steve’s yet another problem. 

Sam can’t quite figure out whether his mind is with Barnes, or Stark or, hell, even Rhodes. He can’t say he’d blame the guy if it was. It’s not like Sam doesn’t twitch in his sleep, reliving a desperate plummet back to earth with his fingertips outstretched and never, ever, close enough to make any goddamn difference. Watching night after night yet another fellow soldier fall from the sky. 

Wherever it is, it ain’t with the four other people about ready to burst at the seams around him. Steve’s always been a leader - Sam’s been around enough of them before to see it. Shit, he’s been around Steve long enough that he knows it’s just how the guy is wired. But now it’s like the man has just checked out from his surroundings. Sam’s trying to be patient, but it’s wearing thin as hell as the days stretch on. 

Scott’s pacing. 

He paces now - something that he’d managed to avoid in the years he spent San Quentin, but here - well, the walls seem closer every damn day. Like they’re closing in on him, like shortly he won’t be able to breath any more. It’s not like they can’t leave, but it’s only really safe under cover of darkness. Like criminals. 

He shakes his head. 

It’s not like it’s a label he’s not acquainted with, obviously, but he thought he’d finally left all that shit behind him. Thought he’d turned a corner onto the straight and narrow. The moral path, if nothing else. Now he’s free, in the strictest sense of the word, but he’s still on the wrong side of the law. 

Wrong side of the world, even. 

Scott turns on his heel, scuffing a mark across the skirting board as he does. It only takes him see good strides to cross to the other side of the room, and he’s far from the biggest guy there. In the moments where he can prise his mind from his own doldrums and onto anyone else, he wonders how Steve deals with it. 

Barton’s used to safe houses. He’s used to being stuck in one place for months on end. That’s not what’s bothering him. What’s bothering him is that, this time, he’s on the wrong side of the law. He’s a criminal. A fugitive. Barton’s got no issues bending the rules to suit the situation, but he’s not used to losing his family over it. 

He knows that Laura gets it. He knows that’s why he’s goddamned lucky to have the woman. But his kids - well, they won’t understand. They’ll accept that Daddy saves the world, they’ll believe in him, and Captain America. But they won’t understand why it is that Daddy’s face flashes across their television in the morning, and the evening, and odd times in between. Not when it comes accompanied with the word ‘criminal’ like a goddamned brand underneath it. 

And the television does that.

Oh boy, does it do that, and then some. 

Even here, a thousand miles and more away from that he’d call home. The battered little set with the aerial that’s come straight out of the seventies, probably, the one that flickers badly until Sam sets the armchair in front of it at an angle just-so. The one that tells them, at regular intervals, that they are the most hated group of individuals in the world.

Some days Barton kicks out at that armchair as he’s wandering past, not even looking at it when he strikes the little wooden feet in just the right angle to send it off-course. Letting the tv signal drop, the picture go all wobbly and fuzzy. It’s petty as all hell, but it makes him feel a little better for a minute. 

The little wooden case that holds the screen in place has a few cracks in it. Some came with the set, but a few of them - more maybe than he’s admitting to - have come from Barton snapping elastic bands off finger guns when Ross appears on screen. He’s deliberately missing the screen, because any news is better than no news so he’ll try not to put something through the curved glass, but seeing Tony Stark’s goateed face flash across it one morning nearly saw his foot through the damn thing. 

It flickers into life again, having recovered from its fit of inactivity. This time it’s recapping the damage caused in London, a nice change given that it actually involves none of the inhabitants of the apartment directly. It still makes the tendon in Steve’s jaw twitch, though, and Sam can see it even from where he’s sat on the other side of what they laughingly refer to as the living room. Sam knows damn well that any Avengers-related stories hit Steve, and hit him hard, but he’s all but given up trying to reach the other man. 

Steve is a master of letting him know everything is okay, even when Sam can damn well see that it isn’t. Steve pastes on that good ol’ boy expression, the one Sam thinks they must have taught him when they were shoving him in front of cameras in the 1940s, back when he was still in booty shorts and tights. 

Sometimes, Sam thinks that Steve is putting the show on more for himself than any of the other four. 

General Ross, that over-privileged asshole, is holding court again. The scrolling text underneath him - Sam’s long since hit the mute button, from the point the anchor smiled with fake teeth and a flip of her hair into camera three and let him know that the snivelling little weasel would be up next - says that control of the enhanced is the only way forward. Sam rolls his eyes as the various Twitter responses follow, most of which agree, with varying levels of grammatical accuracy - that Ross is quite correct.

Some crater of an ex-town, somewhere in the depths of California that Sam’s never heard of and isn’t likely to remember, flickers on the screen for a second or two. He loses the finer details of the reason it’s on there because the sound is still firmly off, but he gets the general gist. It switches back to the studio, where the presenter flips her perfect hair with one perfectly manicured hand before smiling gamely into the main camera again. 

More Twitter comments scroll. Hardly any are complimentary. 

Sam grimaces, and his finger hovers over the channel button, before he remembers belatedly that this is the only channel that they can get on the set. You'd think given the time they've spent cooped up here, it would come as second nature, but he chalks it up to wishful thinking. He sighs, resting his head back against the wall and drawing one knee up to chest as he does so. 

Wanda doesn’t say much. 

None of them do, really, not anymore. But Wanda speaks the least and she has fingers that twitch and jerk their way to her neck every so often, as though there’s something still there, constricting her. She feels it still, in the night mostly, the collar they fixed around her. Like it's still digging into the soft flesh of her throat. When she goes to the bathroom, she'll spend too long staring into the stained mirror and waiting for the angry red marks she's sure must be there to appear.

Sometimes she dreams of the shocks it sent through her when she didn’t react quickly enough to the instructions that came barked through the cell door. Sometimes that jerks her awake in the middle of the night, sweat trickling down her back and into the mattress sheets as she gulps at air that doesn't feel enough when she sucks it in.

She doesn’t tell the boys this, because it’s her problem to deal with, and she can already sense more than enough of the frustration that’s rolling around within them. Anyone could, if they had eyes, but Wanda’s got more than that at her disposal and she’s not keen to add to the cocktail of emotion that she wakes to every morning. 

The dreams are bad enough. 

And it’s not like any of them can do anything about it. Not stuck here, in this tiny apartment that’s falling apart at the edges, in what feels like the world’s most claustrophobic city for all it’s sprawling rooftops and noise. She stands by the window, some days, when she can stand it. Looking out over the rooftops and down at the people who hustle on their way to work. It’s ironic, really, that all she’d longed for when they’d been cooped up underwater, was to see the world. Now she can see the world - can go out in it, even, if she’s careful and night has fallen - but she doesn’t want to. 

She’s afraid. 

The television doesn’t help. All it does it remind her, several times a day, that people hate her. That they’re scared of her, what she can do. And that in turn reminds her that, actually, she’s a little scared of what she can do. More than a little scared. 

Wanda can feel it bubbling within her, like it’s a second person also stuffed within her skin. Sharing the same body space, and getting rapidly sick of the arrangement. She tells herself that it’s just a by-product of her feeding off the emotions of the other four, that they are wound tightly and cooped up, and it’s only to be expected. That her magic is emotion-driven and she’s too receptive to the feelings of others. 

She tells herself that, like a bedtime story. 

Sometimes, she even believes it.

Sam’s watching Steve again, from the corner of his eye. On the face of it, the other guy seems calm, collected. More so than the bubbling melt pot of emotions that the others are swimming around in, but Sam’s seen that before. The calm before the storm, that stillness that a soldier gets just because he goes flip-top stir crazy and shoots somebody just for the hell of it. Because his trigger finger is twitchy, and he’s been hobbled too long. 

He’s trying to keep it together, keep their little band afloat even though there’s an anger brewing in the pit of his stomach that he’s trying hard to swallow. It burns, curls a little higher and wraps around the twist of his gut a little firmer each time he spots one of the others walking the hairtrigger between okay and really-fucking-not-okay. Each time Steve doesn’t notice. Each time Steve - their leader, the guy they all followed - doesn’t do anything. 

Steve’s itching. 

He can feel it, a restless, nagging feeling, deep down - like it’s in his very bones. 

He’d say he can’t remember the last time he felt like this, but it would be a lie. He used to feel like this all the damn time, when he was small and sickly and the whole world was telling him no. He guesses that, at this point, he’s not small and sickly anymore. The world, however. The world has said no to Captain America, and the television that Scott insists on keeping on reminds him daily that they are still saying no. 

Steve reminds himself as well that he chose it too, that he threw down the shield, that it was his choice to do so. That he doesn’t need the shield, or the uniform, or a goddamn battle, to keep going. Except, and it’s a nasty little voice that sounds just like himself that whispers back, except that’s not true. He needs more than just living. He needs a fight, he needs to break his fists on something that he knows is wrong, to remind himself that he’s right. 

And that’s why, when the night sky creeps over the city and the stars spill over the velvety blue of it, Steve Rogers creeps across the floor of the tiny apartment they’ve been living in - carefully avoiding the ones that creak too badly - and lets himself out into the stairwell. Tiptoes still down the stone staircase, because it echoes, and doesn’t stop being cautious until he’s at least a block away from the apartment. 

Only then does he speed up, walking with purpose, though his hood is pulled over his lowered head. He’s not looking for anything in particular. Istanbul is a big enough city, with enough rough edges and corners and people, that it won’t take him long of a night to find someone doing something they oughtn’t. 

Someone he can teach a lesson to, and feel better for it. For a time, at least. 

Tonight his feet take him toward the Blue Mosque and the Hagia Sofia. They stand, facing each other, like two grand dames of opposing families. Both proud, both from a long and illustrious heritage. The minarets slice up into the sky, the curved domes caressing the night. Steve pauses, shoving his hands into his pockets and taking a moment to gaze up at the Hagia Sofia. 

The city is quiet, or at least as quiet as it ever gets. This part, at any rate, is fairly quiet once the tourists have taken their photos and gotten back on the tram. The quiet hours, the ‘tween time, when night is starting to think about bleeding into day but the sun hasn't breached the horizon yet. 

There’s a couple though, curled into each other as they’re sat on a bench by the fountains. The municipal authorities don’t shut the fountain displays off, even at this time of night, and the water is illuminated by the soft lighting that’s trained upon it. Steve quirks a small smile as his gaze lingers on the couple. A man and a girl, the man nuzzling into the girl’s neck. 

Steve looks away, instantly a little embarrassed at the public display, before his hind brain kicks in and lets him know that something wasn’t entirely right about it all. That nuzzling isn’t, usually, done with what looks a lot like teeth. He pauses in his stride, allows himself a brief look back to check whether he's actually seeing what he thinks he might be seeing, and that’s when the light of the fountain lets him see the drip of blood on the paved path. 

He’s running before he’s even really registered it consciously, his fist connecting with the side of the man’s head as hard as he’s able to do so. The girl slumps to the side, and Steve’s more than a little horrified by the way the veins in her neck are opened, by the sheer amount of blood that’s pumping from her. It’s that second of blinking at the sight of it that has him caught unawares and falling backward with the man grabbing at the collar of his jacket. 

It’s then that Steve looks at the man properly. 

It can’t be called a man. Steve’s seen some shit in his time, but nothing like this. The eyes are yellow, the face is … Well, it’s evil, is all that Steve can come up with in the moment, even as he’s falling backward and hitting the concrete with a grunt. Forcing a knee upward, more by instinct than anything else, because he’s still staring at the way the other guy’s forehead is raised and bumpy, he drives it into the guy’s gut. 

The move doesn’t do an awful lot, but the momentum of both their bodies does a bit more, and allows Steve to flip the thing - his brain isn’t letting him think of it as a person anymore, not now he’s processed the blood staining on its teeth and the way the crimson beads at the edge of white points - over his head and into the nearest flowerbed. Then Steve’s up and scrambling for position, the thing coming right back at him with bared teeth and a glint in its eye that lets him know this is no playground scrap. 

Despite his shock, despite the girl on the bench behind him who is either dead or dying, despite the monster that’s flying toward him, Steve can feel his blood sing in his veins. He has enough grace left to feel a shiver of shame at that, even as he’s blocking and then swinging out as hard as he can at the thing. 

They’re fairly evenly matched, and Steve marvels at its strength, a thought that earns him a glancing blow to side of his jaw that teaches him to keep his mind on the matter at hand. Then he’s over again, on his back in the dirt and scrabbling against the monster that’s all but pinning him to the ground. 

Steve reaches up above his head, desperate and grasping for anything that comes to hand. All that does are two wooden pegs from the garden, and - in the absence of anything else - Steve yanks at them and pushes his hands forward, hoping to use them as extra leverage somehow. There’s a hiss and a snarl, and Steve, realising that his eyes were squeezed shut, opens them instantly. 

He’s got the pegs crossed in front of him, pressed up with all his strength against the thing’s chest - trying to get it off him - and the bare flesh is… Well, it’s sizzling. Burning. The monster howls in pain and scrambles backward, up off Steve with knees and hands fighting for purchase, its chest still smoking.

Steve blinks in surprise, unsure and confused, but muscle memory brings him up and after the thing even as it moves away from him. Too late he realises that he still has the pegs grasped firmly - now in one large fist - and as his momentum takes him forward with force, the pointed and earth-covered tip of one drives into the centre of the thing’s chest. 

A brief and sudden flash of remorse douses him, but it’s gone almost as quickly as it sends him cold, because as the wood tip pierces the charred flesh and sinks in deep, the monster looks down at it. Then back at Steve, sat in the middle of a Turkish flowerbed, blinking back at him with his mouth wide open.

And then it bursts into dust. 

Agent Riley Finn, waiting in the shadows of the Hagia Sofia with his recon team, takes a deep breath as he watches Captain America dust a vampire. 

“Sir?” 

One of the team steps up to Riley’s shoulder, and he silences the other man with one raised hand, eyes still on the big blond sweeping vampire dust off his jacket with a dazed expression painted over his face in the low lighting. 

“I need to make a call,” Riley murmurs.


	3. The Carter Girl

London, 1930

 

Margaret “Peggy” Carter is nine years old. 

That is to say, she is nine years old and three quarters, thank you very much. It's an important distinction, and she's not yet tired of reminding anyone who might happen to forget it. She scuffs the soles of her polished shoes along the gravel path that winds its way through manicured flowerbeds, knowing full well that there will be words said about the marks later, and finally turns to scowl back up at the building in front of her. 

She pushes dark curls away from her face, leaving behind a generous smear of dirt across her forehead that will latterly have her mother sighing over it. She can see people moving in the drawing room, shadowy figures that shift in and out of the light, indistinct behind the glass and half-hidden by the gloom and heavy drapes that fall across the window. She huffs and blows out her cheeks in consternation, shoving restless hands into the pockets of her pinafore dress. 

Her father is busy. 

He's always busy, meetings and conferences and lord only knows what else. They bring lots of people - men, mostly - to visit the grand old building in which they reside. It is only partly a home - though when Peggy is grown enough to consider it properly, there are dark moments when she will declare with burning heat that it was barely even a home in part. In her kinder fits she will refer to it as a museum. In the very darkest depths, a mausoleum. 

It is, partly, the headquarters of the Watcher’s Council. 

Harrison Carter is the head of the Council. Just as his father was, and his father before that - all the way back to some ancient Carter who was - so they say, so is written in one of the heavy tomes that lines the walls of the library - actually the Slayer’s Watcher. The Carters have a long and illustrious history, deeply entwined with the Slayer. Peggy’s mother has been known to mutter, under her breath, that the Carters are far more concerned with the history of appearance than anything practical. 

Even her father’s older brother, Uncle Howard, the one who when Peggy was just a small child went searching for traces of the ancient Slayers who lived and fought in Egypt and found his name splashed all over the papers - and indeed the history books - when he discovered instead a huge cache of royal tombs instead; even he has his own place in the arcane books that line the shelves. 

Peggy’s father still grumbles about it sometimes over lashings of tea and toast in the afternoons, when her mother is fussing around them all as they squish in at the small table that is nestled in the breakfast room. Michael kicks his sister under the table and Peggy jabs her sticky fork into his forearm in brief retaliation before her mother tuts and takes it away. 

“Little girls,” she will say, with an arched eyebrow and a resigned look on her face before she drops the offending item into the sink. “Do not stab people.”

It’s the wrong thing to say, for this household more than most knows exactly what little girls are capable of, and she will more often than not be drowned out with competing stories from Peggy, Michael and - on occasion, when his nose is not buried in some paper or other - her husband, which illustrate quite why that sentiment is wrong. 

Peggy Carter - and her brother, Michael, also destined to be a Watcher - know all the stories of the Slayers, inside and out. 

They’ve grown up on them, of course. The one girl in all the world, the one who has the strength to fight the demons, the beasties, the ones that creep and crawl and suck in the depths of the night. Michael squeals and hides his head under the covers but Peggy - Peggy wants to hear exactly how it all happened. She hugs her knees to her chest under the blankets and, with shining eyes, demands her father tell them more. 

She learned to read from the books in the library, perched at her father’s side whilst she traced with one chubby finger and mouthed the unfamiliar words to herself, though her mother eventually put her foot down and ended all of that when one of the books set ablaze and took half the curtains with it. 

It seems that Latin and books - the ones in her father’s library, at any rate - ought not to be mixed.

It's not books that she's interested in, even the ones that detail all the escapades through the centuries, all the ways in which the Slayer has been trained and the techniques that have been used. Even though she’s read all the ones she’s allowed cover to cover and back again - and some of the ones her mother forbade her to read, the ones with gruesome illustrations and too many descriptions of the darkest arts. It's the weapons, the fighting styles and the danger that appeals. She longs, above all else, to be trained as a Slayer.

Her father doesn't know that, after darkness has fallen and the household rests in slumber, she creeps down the sweeping staircase with her nightdress hitched up and soft feet that know precisely where to step to avoid making any noise.

He doesn’t know that she passes the library on the left, keeps going down the long hallway that's decorated with paintings of her ancestors - all, apparently, having passed down through the ages the self same scowl that her father uses when he's displeased - and finally up to the huge door that presides at the end of the corridor.

It's locked, but she has a key - secret, stolen, spirited away in a snatched moment of opportunity - that lives on a chain around her neck, and it glides into the well oiled keyhole without protest. Beyond lies Peggy's dreams, all displayed on the walls and shining in the moonlight that flickers overhead through the skylight. 

Axes, swords, throwing stars, weapons from the East that she's only seen illustrated in books and never used in person. Stakes - chest upon chest of carved wooden stakes - the ones her father insists on stocking incase the Council building should ever be breached. The ones that she knows will pierce the chest of a vampire. 

And so, with her nightdress hitched and belted up tight so that skinny pale legs are free to work, Peggy practises. With the door shut firmly no sound will escape but she keeps as quiet as a mouse nonetheless. It’s a secret that she will manage to keep to herself for years on end, even when she is much grown and finds it harder to creep unheard along at night through the silent corridors with the reproachful gaze of her ancestors glaring down at her.

But today, in the sunshine that seems to a small girl to stretch on for endless days, she scowls once more at the figures she can see in the drawing room window. 

The Council members, those shadowy men who appear at odd hours of the day, tramping through the house and tipping their hats all too quickly towards her mother and never to Peggy. The men whose voices she can hear rumble when she listens at the door, snatches of stories and discussions overhead before her mother hurries her off elsewhere to books that only drone on about mathematics and verb conjugations. 

\-------

“The Slayer must be tested. This is how the rite of passage has been actioned for centuries.”

Harrison Carter sets both his jaw and the whiskey tumbler he’s been sipping from as he speaks. The glass clinks against the oak table as he sets it down, and Jackson withers slightly in front of him. He sighs.

“I simply mean to say…” Jackson’s voice cracks as he speaks, high and reedy in the thick air. “I mean to suggest that, that, perhaps this isn’t the right way to-”

“The Cruciamentum is a test that all the Slayers have gone through,” he says heavily. “For generations. Centuries. She has turned eighteen now. You mean to suggest that Moon is any different to those in whose path she follows?” The other man stutters, eyes sliding from side to side as he looks for support from the other men gathered in the drawing room. 

He finds none. 

“I thought not.”

\-------

Peggy is, for the moment, unseen. By the Council and - perhaps more importantly - by her mother. She cuts a switch from the hazel bush that lines the fence, overgrown and threatening to take over the rose bush beside it. Dark curls falling into her face as she moves, Peggy thrusts forward into the chest of an imaginary vampire. 

“Hey-”

At the last possible moment, she looks up and jerks back, the tip of the switch just grazing the centre of her little brother’s chest. She huffs, annoyed at being interrupted, tossing her hair back over her shoulder and losing one small pink bow in the process. It remains on the path, only to be crushed under foot moments later. Pink silk sinks into the dirt. 

“You know Mama doesn’t like you doing that,” Michael says in a sing song voice as he grins at her from behind a face freckled by the sun. Peggy sticks out her tongue at him, aggravated by his words - and the look on his face - but unable to disagree. She opts, instead, for nonchalance. 

“Doing what?” She throws back in return, twisting so that her back is facing him instead, one eye still on the drawing room, switch in hand. She tosses it, letting it rotate once, twice, and half way through a third time before snatching it from the air and jabbing forward into an imaginary foe. 

As it falls to the ground, writhing in equally imaginary death-throes, Michael steps up to her shoulder. 

“You know,” he huffs, kicking at the loose stones on the gravel path they stand on. “Slayer stuff.”

“It’s not Slayer stuff,” Peggy snaps in retaliation, all too aware of the hot flush that spreads instantly across her cheeks and down her neck. The peter pan collar of the little pinafore dress she wears suddenly feels too much too tight over her throat. Beside her, Michael rolls his eyes. 

“Is too,” he says idly, bored already by the conversation and eyeing the switch she is grasping at as he speaks. “We’re Watchers, Peg.” He emphasises the word, like it’s something important and she feels an itch in her bones to hear him say it. Michael, who is a year younger and doesn’t care for the stories that lie inside dusty books, wants to grow into a Watcher. 

Peggy catches the snort in the back of her throat before it escapes. 

“You don’t know that,” she sniffs instead, twirling the switch like a baton in her hand, letting it spin under her control before grasping it firmly once more and jabbing again into some unseen enemy that had snuck up behind them. “You don’t know what we’ll grow to.”

“Do too,” Michael insists, wiping his shirt cuff over a runny nose, and smearing snot along the crisp starched crease. “Carters are Watchers,” he intones, and Peggy turns to face him, fascinated against her will to hear her father’s words from her little brother. 

“This Carter isn’t going to follow where the others have tread,” she says decisively. Her mind is full of the stories she has read, of the Slayers who have gone before. Of the girl who - even now, even as Peggy and her brother stand amidst English roses and chrysanthemums - fights for the survival of the world against the dark forces. 

Peggy grips the switch in her hand ever tighter as she speaks. The bite of it cuts across the soft flesh of her palm and she ignores it, dark eyes only half in the little English rose garden, the rest of her firmly thrown forward into a musty and cobweb-ridden crypt where the dead rise with murder in their eyes. 

At her side, Michael pulls a face. 

\-------

“This,” Harrison pulls open the drawer of the bureau in front of him, the polished mahogany bureau that his father had left. He surveys the contents momentarily before pulling the little box out and setting it carefully on the table. “This, gentlemen, needs to be sent to Seoul, post-haste.”

Fingers find the edge of the box, feel along the sides until the tell-tale bump in the wood makes itself known. Pressing in gently, the lid springs open and he counts quickly the vials and syringes neatly packed inside it. Five and change, more than enough for the job at hand. Harrison replaces the lid with care, and ensures that it is snapped back into place. 

He looks up again. 

“Smythe, Hollander and Gregory, I expect that you will follow in due course,” Harrison briefly meets the eyes of each man in turn, a small nod from each confirming their acceptance. “Good. All that remains is the choice of vampire.”

“William the Bloody?” 

Harrison looks up sharply at the suggestion from the back of the room, narrowing his eyes as he considers, but shakes his head and returns his gaze to the box in front of him. He straightens it before answering, making the edge line adjacent to the decorative beading on the table. “He killed Xin Rong thirty years ago. I mean to test the girl, but we do need her alive at the end of it.”

There is murmuring and some smatter of laughter. Harrison raises an eyebrow, and the room descends into shades of quiet once more. Straightening, he hands off the box to Bassington, who takes it with a nod. 

“Determine which, and make the arrangements,” Harrison commands with a gesture of one hand, the other smoothing his tie back into place. The assembled group, dismissed, take their leave excepting for Jone who remains at the window, hands clasped together behind his back as he looks out. 

Harrison steps up beside his old mentor, and gazes out upon his own rose garden. 

“Your girl is … Scrappy.”

Harrison can hear the word the other man means to say, but tradition, stiff manners and a lifetime of friendship stays his tongue. He sighs, fingers twitching the netting briefly as he fixes his eyes upon his daughter. Switch in hand, she swings expertly upwards before flinging her free arm to the side as if to knock an imaginary foe. The switch flashes forward and the movement she makes is a clear killing blow. 

“She’s not a Slayer, Carter,” Jones says, not turning his head to look at the other man, and Harrison closes his eyes in response. When he opens them again, Peggy is aiming a high kick to mid-air and losing her sole remaining pink bow in the process. 

“She knows,” he answers, voice more confident in his words than his heart - clenching inside his chest much as his fists are where they have been thrust into his trouser pockets. Jones finally turns to him at that, face etched with wrinkles and a life that has wrought him a deep scar across one eye. An eye that bores into Harrison unflinchingly. 

“Does she?”


	4. Conversations With the Dead

Scottish Highlands, 2017.

“Are they seriously still talking about the Avengers?”

Buffy rolls her eyes as she wanders into the common room, zipping up her hoodie as she walks, stake stuffed carelessly into the back of her jeans to leave her hands free. The lights are low, a soft glow thrown against the walls and the flicker of the enormous tv screen mounted on the wall is illuminating the dark-haired man stood in front of it. She pauses to steal the half-full coffee mug Xander has carelessly left unattended whilst he channel surfs.

“Still big news, Buff,” he says without turning to her, knowing even without the use of both eyes what she’s doing. The petite blonde hops up with ease - a careless, effortless movement - onto the smooth expanse of marble counter, draining the remainder of the coffee as she watches him pause on CNN. General Ross flashes across the screen, his teeth bared in some semblance of what is probably supposed to be a smile. 

Both Buffy and Xander recoil from the screen slightly, even as far away as it is from the pair of them.

“Anti-super activity in the US,” Xander comments, words heavy with the ghosts of conversations they’ve already had over and over, turning to her finally and shooting her a pained look as she sets his empty mug on the counter beside her. Buffy returns that look with a rueful shrug of her shoulders, before hopping down in one easy movement. 

Xander continues, a heavy sigh catching in the back of his throat as he does, one hand stretching for the jar of instant coffee that doubles for decent java in these parts. 

“And Germany, France, Turkey…”

He trails off as Buffy fixes him with a sharp look. 

“What?”

“We’re not super, Xander,” she says, a brief flash of annoyance colouring her eyes before she rolls them at him. “We’re nothing like the Avengers.” She gestures toward the television which now features a pretty brunette discoursing at length on the Sokovian drama. As if anyone needed reminding of their faces, alongside her words the screen flashes up photos of Captain America, the Black Widow, Hawkeye and the young girl with magic powers. 

The news teams like to feature her the most. 

Wanda Maximoff. 

Buffy’s seen Willow shatter glasses by accident with her mind, her usually careful control of the inherent magic bubbling within her slipping, so angry is the other woman when these people talk of the girl and the pride with which they tell of the measures taken against her. Buffy can’t help be put in mind of the time her own mother and the rest of the Sunnydale anti-Occultists had taken against Willow.

“Yeah? ‘Cause I’ve seen you toss a guy across the room if he so much as looked at you wrong, Summers,” Xander retorts with a wink from his one good eye, the other hidden under the eyepatch he still insists on wearing though Buffy’s certain there must be other less old-fashioned options. “In fact, come to think of it, I’ve been that guy. Call me medieval, but that’s pretty super to me.”

“And never once in spandex,” Buffy says with quirk of an eyebrow and a tilt to her head that should tell Xander to drop it - except that as long as she’s known him, he’s never managed to pick up on that cue from anyone, least of all her. 

“I mean, sometimes in leather, though-” 

And he’s probably about to expand on that thought, until the dripping dishcloth she’s flung at him from the other side of the kitchen counter hits him square in the face and it’s finally enough of a hint for him to drop the topic. He drops it back into the sink and draws the back of his wrist, covered with plaid shirt, across his chin, a small half-formed grin creasing his face as he does it. 

“Be that as it may, Buff-” 

There’s a tone change in that voice, and Buffy stops in her stride but doesn’t turn to look at him. The tilt to her head and the fact that she stopped at all lets him know that she is actually listening. The fact that the little blonde has not turned to face him lets him know that she already knows what he’s about to say. 

Xander sucks in a breath and speaks anyway, as though this isn’t a topic they’ve tossed back and forth over the fence of their friendship, neither of them ever quite able to stray to the other’s side, no matter how many times they dance the same dance. 

“Whatever you think of the girls, the Slayers…” He rubs a hand over the back of his neck, wincing slightly when his fingers find a particularly stubborn knot of muscles that tense together. Xander huffs. He can practically sense the eyebrow lifting, even though he can’t actually see it. “Look, I know you hate them being lumped in with the supers but you’ve gotta recognise that for most people… You know, ordinary soccer moms grabbing their kids at practice and dads who parent at the weekends… Buffy, for them, there’s no difference.”

Buffy’s shoulders are tight, raised, and Xander lets out a forced breath through his nose, taking a step forward toward her. His hands lift just above her arms and he’s about to place them on her, squeeze her arms, when he thinks better of it. He drops his hands to his own sides and shrugs, albeit to himself. 

Behind him, General Ross’ latest viterol against the Avengers plays on, the beauty of twenty-four hour news repeating over and over again with the odd new snapshot of film footage intersecting each piece. The shadow of his face looms over both of them, almost as though he and his stifling views are filling the room. 

Buffy’s head drops slightly, the fight in the tense of her muscles relaxing almost imperceptibly. Relaxing, Xander thinks to himself, is entirely the wrong word for the minute change in her stance. Nothing about the Slayer is relaxed anymore, not since Ross and the anti-super movement kicked off in earnest. A certain rueful grin, brief and fleeting, passes over crags of his face as he glances at the girl. If Xander is being honest, Buffy hasn’t been truly relaxed for most of her adult life. The General and stirring of negative feeling that follows in his wake is only adding another complication.

Xander’s heart squeezes painfully in the middle of his chest as he allows himself a moment of sadness for the young girl Buffy Anne Summers might have been, had this not been her birthright. 

He knows better though, than to let himself wallow in that kind of pointless indulgence. Buffy certainly doesn’t, and she’s the one shouldering not only her own burden but that of the girls to whom she extended her strength.

Whatever the little blonde likes to tell him, however much she rails against the comparison, the fact is that a slayer looks like a super to the uninitiated. 

And it’s starting to get dangerous. 

“Did Kennedy’s team check back in?”

Buffy’s almost at the door, having taken advantage of his inward reverary to make good her escape, fingertips on the door handle when she pauses and tosses him the question over her shoulder. Her blonde hair is clipped back, function over form because it’s shorter now but still long enough to get in the way when she’s fighting. Though she doesn’t look a bare fraction of her thirty seven years, some other side-effect of the Slayer blood that keeps her stronger than most men, she’s long since passed bothering too much. 

There hasn’t been anyone since Spike - not anything serious, at least - and no matter the questioning glances that Willow sometimes throws her across the dinner-table, Buffy’s happy that way. She’s accepted by now, so many years and end-of-the-worlds later, that her birthright comes with clauses and one of those is the no-happy-ending proviso.

She doesn’t need a white knight. She IS the white knight. 

“Yeah,” Xander answers, crossing the room in a few long strides and flipping up the lid on an ancient laptop. He glances back at her with a lopsided grin, one he’s been giving her since he was sixteen. The one she knows he thinks gives him a flash of boyish charm. “All four, checked back in two hours ago. Simple vamp nest, some little town in New Mexico, nothing to worry about.”

“There’s no such thing as a simple vamp nest,” Buffy says shortly. Her eyes flicker over Xander’s eye patch, pausing so minutely on the little leather square that both of them can try to pretend that it didn’t happen. He shifts from one foot to the other under her gaze, and finally speaks. 

“Patrol?”

It’s redundant question. Buffy’s been patrolling for the best part of twenty years and change, but they both welcome the somewhat awkward gear shift in the conversation. 

“Yuhuh,” Buffy tosses over her shoulder as she turns back to the door. “Wish me bad guys.”

“Always,” Xander calls with a false brightness in his voice that matches Buffy’s own, but the door has shut firmly on the little blonde. 

\--------

She’s stalked the perimeter of the cemetery three times, looping the crumbling walls easily and tossing the stake from hand to hand under the weak and pale moonlight that hangs overhead, before the freshly turned earth starts to shift in a new grave. 

“Finally,” Buffy grumbles under her breath, snatching the stake out of the air as it twists for a final time, turning on her heel as she does so and making her way to the grave. “Some of us did wanna catch the final of Bake Off, you know.”

The earth shudders, little clumps of soil tumbling to each side and into the trodden grass around the grave as the vamp within struggles to fight their way out. Buffy hunkers down and extends a hand - the one not gripping her stake - as the vamp’s head breaches the soil mound for the first time. 

“Need a hand?” She offers with a crooked smile. 

He’s young, far younger than her, younger than Dawn. Maybe even young enough to not have had his first cold beer in a bar, gotten his driver’s license or had a chance to make his X on a voting slip. Buffy wonders, for a brief moment, what might have become of this man’s life had he not accepted a car ride home from someone he thought he knew. Or hadn’t gone to the back row of a movie theatre. Or a myriad other different, simple, ways that might have ended up with him spluttering his last breath to a dark night that only laughed right back at him with red-stained teeth. 

She shakes her head slightly. That kind of thinking leads to madness, not only because Buffy stakes - and has staked - more young people than most others have met in their lives, but also because it’s a mere hop, skip and a jump to what-if-ing her own life. And boy has she done enough of that over the years. 

“You’re joking me, right?” The vamp sighs, with something of a roll of the eyes. 

“So sorry to disappoint,” Buffy snaps back, blinking her way back into the graveyard and focusing her attention once more fully on the man in front of her, highlighted by the moon and still only halfway crawled out of his own grave, dirt in his hair and dusting the shoulders of his best suit. “Were you hoping for some other welcoming committee? A banner, some cake? Fairy lights announcing your arrival to undead-hood?”

“No,” the vamp snipes right back at her, rubbing one hand at the back of its neck, eyes ducking away from her with a sullen look within them. He rests his head back against the smooth marble expanse of his own headstone. “It’s just … Ah, forget it.”

His words are accompanied by a dismissive wave of one hand that has the Slayer seeing red. 

“What, you’re playing passive-aggressive now?” Buffy says with narrowed eyes, taking a step back and putting her hands on her hips, stake held loosely and not quite forgotten about. She’s reminded of the irritation of youth, the righteous indignation of those who think they know all about life despite having lived just a fraction of it. The bald fact that she had been exactly the same, possibly even more so, she pushes to the back of her mind and ignores. “Just spit it out, will you, I haven’t got all night. Places to go, people-who-used-to-be-people to stake and all that.”

“I didn’t realise this was a deli-counter, take a ticket and you get your turn affair,” the vamp sniffs, turning his head slightly from her and shifting in his own grave dirt. He is still buried to the waist, trapped partly by the coffin he’s been interred in. The deep midnight blue suit that he wears is dusted with soil, the white shirt collar stained muddy and brown at the edges. 

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Buffy counters, sarcasm dripping from every word, taken aback at the vamp’s attitude. “Please, do take your time. Don’t let your impending re-death hasten your little speech at all. After all, I am part-Slayer, part-shrink. Totally here for all your whining needs.”

The vamp sighs dramatically, rolling his head back against the headstone and throwing her a sarcastic look that Buffy definitely remembers seeing from Dawn’s teenage years. She’s no less irritated to see it from a vamp that, by rights, should already be done and dusted. He shuffles from within the grave and there is a sharp cracking sound that echoes across the still of the night as part of his coffin shatters against his weight and new-found strength. Wriggling from side to side, a little moreso now that there’s more room where the wood has given way, he’s still stuck fast. 

Shoulders slumping and hair previously carefully gelled falling into his face, the vamp huffs out a frustrated groan that has Buffy making an eyeroll of her own. 

“Oh jeez, just take the hand and put us all out of our misery,” she says sharply, thrusting her free hand out toward him, shoving it practically under his nose and waving it impatiently. Sulkily, the vamp grasps hold of her, and she pulls him free, earning herself a free shower of dirt for her altruism. 

He stands a little taller than she does, shaking his shoulders and smoothing down the lines of the fitted suit he was buried in. Soil has collected around his shoes - Italian loafers, if Buffy isn’t much mistaken, and the long-asleep valley girl inside her blinks awake and pipes up with some interest at the subject before she is beaten back down again. Cloud passes off the moon for a moment and bathes the pair of them in a light so bright it’s almost like daytime. 

“So where’s your… You know,” the vamp shrugs toward her, and Buffy wrinkles her nose in response, unclear as to what the hell he’s going on about. Apparently the gesture is pretty universal for it earns her yet another eyeroll - she’s looking forward to dusting this kid more than the average vamp, and that’s for sure - and a semi-explanation. 

“Your suit,” he says with a glance that takes in the ancient hoodie, the jeans that have seen a few better days and the holes in them that weren’t originally artfully decorating the fabric but rather have been worn in through over use. “I mean, shouldn’t you be head to toe in-”

“I swear to God, kid, if the next word out of your fang-framed mouth is ‘spandex’, this stake is going so far through your chest it’ll be out the other side before you’ve managed to get to the second syllable,” Buffy threatens.

“I was just saying-” he starts, a sullen look on his pale face. 

“Well, don’t,” Buffy cuts across him, gesturing with the stake in her left hand as she talks. “No one asked for your opinion on appropriate slay-wear, and this isn’t a movie montage where some stranger offers clothing advice during a break in upbeat theme music.”

“Someone has a sore spot,” the vamp counters, raising an eyebrow at her from two feet away. She adjusts her grip on the stake and makes sure the movement is caught by the man in front of her. “I thought superheroes were supposed to be all committed to the cause, or whatever.”

“Excuse me-”

Buffy’s jaw has dropped open at his words, the red rush of rage colouring across her face as he drops the S-word on her, and she’s only just able to squeak out the two words of indignation before he’s continuing on as if she’d never made a sound. Once the mist has cleared a little for her, she’s able to refocus back onto what he’s saying. 

“-I mean, it’s all very well and that, but don’t you think that the whole super-heroing trope has become a little…” The vampire trails off as he looks down at her, and Buffy blinks at him, her stake hand dropping a little along with her jaw as she stares up at him. His shoulders rise in something of a shrug as he finishes. 

“Commercialised?” 

She’s tempted to stake him just for the look on his face, never mind what it is that he’s saying to her, and there’s a brief flash of thought through her mind that wonders what the hell the vamp that turned him was thinking. Then his words register a little deeper with her. 

“Trope?” Buffy splutters, dropping her stake hand entirely and taking a step back as she fully registers what he’s just said. The vampire seems to finally register that, just possible, pissing off a girl with a sharpened wooden stake might not be the smartest move he’ll ever make, and just as he’s processing that thought, it shift-changes to the last move he’s ever made. 

Buffy coughs indelicately from the spray of dust that showers her when the vamp explodes into a million and one pieces, the tip of her trusty stake piercing his unbeating heart with razor-sharp precision. 

“Fucking spandex,” she mutters.


	5. Death of a Slayer

Seoul, Korea, 1935

Moon Kyong-ja, last of her name, last of her dynasty, is ready for death. 

Brought to her knees, head nonetheless raised and facing the oncoming step of her murderer, fire rages around her. The other girl’s teeth flash unnaturally against the light of the fire that illuminates her path. Moon cannot return the smile but will not give the satisfaction of a bowed head to her opponent. The flames dance, bright orange and red as they lick at her heels where she is prostrate on the wooden floor. A rivulet of blood makes its slow way around the curve of her forehead, past her brow and drips drop from the end of her nose. The splash it makes upon the floor in front of her is at once inconsequential and monumental. 

She sucks in a deep breath that fills her lungs, aware that it is likely the last time that she will do so, and reflects upon the passing of her life. 

Moon has been ready for the cool kiss of shadow upon her brow since her fourteenth birthday. Since the upright gentleman with dark hair swept carefully to the left, the man who spoke Korean - albeit it in clipped tones and with an odd accent - appeared at the door of her father’s house and told her that she had inherited her birthright. That she alone, of all the peoples in the world, had the abilities to keep them at bay. 

The plague of the fanged beast was not unknown. 

Too many families had suffered the loss of loved ones to the smiling assassins, the ones who lurked in the dark and dealt fatal kisses with teeth too sharp to be human. Moon was happy to train, to learn her trade, to fight against the oncoming armies of the undead. She had spent her life in the nights, creeping from graveyard to graveyard, her days spent sharpening both her skills and her stakes.

Her father had lamented her unmarriageable status, the deep scars that cut into her smooth skin and the shorn haircut she had chosen to adopt rendering her undesirable to the young men of Seoul. Moon was less bothered by this than perhaps her father had expected her to be, but then Moon’s father was apparently unaware of the other places and people with whom a young woman might find pleasure, let alone love. 

Moon’s mother had understood her birthright all too well. 

The morning after Moon’s Watcher had claimed her, the broken and twisted body that had once belonged to Moon’s mother lay at the bottom of the stairs in their family home, blood pooling around her face, her neck twisted at an unnatural angle. Eyes closed as if in sleep, when Moon looked down upon her mother it was the first time that the fourteen year old girl had seen a body whose soul had departed for better climes. 

It was not to be the last, though a good deal of the rest were somewhat more animated. 

Four years hence, and Moon had faced the Cruciamentum. Weakened like a baby, pliant, and for the first time in her short life as the Slayer, afraid of what waited for her in the dark, she had fought tooth and nail for her very life. When she crawled, choking and barely breathing from the ruins of the house she had brought down around the beast whose teeth had grazed a reddened path along the line of her jugular, her Watcher had merely nodded and clicked on his pocketwatch. 

Moon had passed the Watchers’ test, and she was left to wash to soot from her face and tend to the wounds that had broken her skin and her soul. It was the first time that she had recognised the truth of her inheritance - that, no matter what empty words were passed along to her from the Watchers’ Council, Moon was truly alone in her endeavour. 

With bound knuckles and a slew of new scars added to her body, she returned to her calling a different woman. For a woman she now was, passed the bonds of girlhood and born from fire and flame into a new life. Her Watcher had seen to that. The scars faded, as they were wont to do, the medals won in battle disappearing as her enhanced body regenerated itself. All except for one - the split of skin broken by unnatural teeth along the line of her very existence, a scar that ran from the sharp angle of her collarbone to her jaw, mirroring her jugular vein. 

Moon looked upon it as a badge of honour, a battle she had won when all odds had been thought lost or bartered away. Even now, five hard years later, it flushed red and angry against the pale skin of her throat. 

The vampire who approaches runs her eyes along that reddened line, and a salivating tongue slowly drags across bared teeth. Moon swallows but moves not, body tensed and ready to fight to her death. She can see her own ghost watching her carefully, knows that her body will lie unmoving with the dawn that rises tomorrow. 

Moon gives a slow smile, one that reaches from one side of her porcelain smooth face to the other, lifting the edges of pink lips into something that does not contain a single trace of mirth. 

She is ready for death, and tonight it comes for her. 

Not, as she had long since supposed, with a shout and the sharpened and bared fang she had fought for so many years, but sneaking through the streets like a stray dog, tagging at her heels. Moon had felt the presence of a being other than herself for a time before she let her awareness known. The vampire had grinned behind her, had Moon been able to see in all directions. A feral grin that was split with sharpened tooth. 

In the end, though she fights and fights fiercely, she lies as still as the rest of them, Slayer or no. Death, when it claims, claims equally and without prejudice. 

Her neck snapped, much like her mother’s, though this by another’s hand rather than her own. Her skin is ice-pale when her lifeforce has departed, looking as much like those she has spent her life hunting than she ever would have in life. Blood spreads around her, rich and red, congealing as it pools around her body. 

Moon Kyong-ja, though she will never know it, is the longest living of her line, the only Slayer thus far to reach the grand age of twenty-five. Whispers of her endeavours, of the vampires and demons she has slain have reached shores strange to her own eyes, shores she can never now hope to reach.

There is a sigh, a deep sigh, that resonates around the small room. 

Shoes that shine even in the flickering and dying light of the flames that had threatened to consume the house in which Moon will die, will breath her last into a world that has never appreciated the sacrifices she has given to it, step delicately across the devastation that lies therein. They crunch against the shattered glass that decorates the polished wooden floor, until he stands above the girl. 

He glances down, and Moon’s eyes roll up to meet him. A silent, desperate, prayer is held within them, she chokes on the air that ought in any other circumstance to save her, blood bubbling from the corners of her mouth as she breathes out a plea for help that won’t ever be heard. He looks down at her impassively. 

As the last gasp of her life’s essence leaves her parted, painted, lips, the stranger sighs heavily again. 

He had had such high hopes for this one. Had thought that she had been the key, the girl that he had been waiting for, the one to fulfill the prophecy. And yet, as they all had before, death had claimed her. This one was the same as all the rest. 

Turning on his heel, the stranger passed not one more glance at Moon Kyong-ja’s beaten body. The fire, set by her in an act of desperation against a foe she was finally unable to beat, consumes what is left of the house and bleaches her bones before it chars them beyond all recognition.


	6. The Things You Never Knew

Prague, 2017. 

Maria Hill, who has had a few names in her time, this being only the latest of which, swipes a pass at a doorway and taps her foot impatiently as the electronics swing into play and trigger the door to slide smoothly open in front of her. 

She strides through, not waiting for the door to fully open as she twists her body to fit the gap it’s thus far managed, and makes her way down the small stone staircase with haste. In the last twenty four hours the game has changed in ways she’s never quite considered before, and Maria needs to get a handle on it. Descending as fast as she can, the brunette reflects that life is rarely straightforward and almost never easy. 

Maria’s always been the pragmatic sort of woman, something that’s carried her through a few identities, a couple of secret agencies and has provided her with a view of life that some things are just more important. She’s been laying low, pretty much ever since her boss - the one that actually pays her, in fact is still paying her, though she’s almost certain that’s an oversight on his part - decided to wage war on her other boss. The one that’s now a fugitive, the one that dropped both his shield and the name that made him in a deserted HYDRA base in the middle of the frozen wastelands of Siberia. 

The shield that now hangs on the wall behind her desk in the little stone room hidden underground in the maze that sits below Prague Castle, a secret labyrinth gifted to her by Fury - the other, other boss - just before he disappeared off the face of the earth. 

Again. 

Maria kicks the door open and feels a little better about the whole situation before she drops herself into the battered leather swivel chair that’s wedged back against the wall of the small room, booted feet finding their way to the edge of her desk as she rests her head to the back of the chair and sighs deeply. 

Vampire activity is not a surprise. Has not, in fact, been a surprise for Maria since her name was Samantha and she was dropped in the middle of the South American jungle and a nest of demons hungry for blood and whatever else they could get at. She’s always been adaptable, though, and as it turns out demons die just as easily as men do when tactics are tweaked to suit. 

Explaining vamp activity, though, that’s usually the kicker. 

How far does one go? What, precisely, does one explain? Once upon a time not so very long ago, when the world was more ignorant and people generally didn’t look much past the ends of their own noses, well then it was easier to sweep into a town, clean up and tell the relieved citizens there was a gas leak. Best to clear out, just for a couple of days. Yes, go visit your aunt in Boulder. 

Maria has had a long-held suspicion that people actively wanted to hear the lie. After all, demons had walked the earth as long as men - longer, depending on the books you read. Like all prey, there had to be som innate sense of fear and recognition, even if the knowledge had been lost to all but those who had the means to hunt the predators back. There had to be some measure of comfort in wilful ignorance. 

Now, in the age of superheroes and aliens who come to Earth, either to save or to destroy it - some would argue there is little difference between the two, and Maria snorts as her feet cover that day’s newspaper, General Thaddeus Ross splashed all over the front pages yet again and spewing the same old shit he’s been peddling for years - in today’s world, there are more options. 

Citizens who believe in Thor, who saw the Chitauri with their own two frightened eyes, who have been saved personally by an Avenger, those citizens would be quite ready to believe in vampires and the like. The demonkind who stalk the streets at night and pick off the helpless - and even the not quite so helpless. 

For all that the general public are more likely to believe in the beasties that go bump in the night, they’re just as likely as they always were to be picked off by them.

Riley’s call was unexpected, to say the least. Not the news that there were vampires preying on the locals in Istanbul - that was practically a given, and frankly barely a blip on her ever-sweeping radar. And certainly not that the renegade Avengers were hiding out in the city. That she’d known almost since the moment they’d set foot back in Europe. Slightly before, in actual fact. 

So sue her. She was in the intelligence game, after all. 

But Steve dusting a vamp, well, that was unexpected. Perhaps unexpected wasn’t entirely the right word - he’d clearly have the strength to do it. And it wasn’t as though Captain America hadn’t seen some shit in his time. But Maria had, for some reason, never really anticipated a time when she’d have to sit down and explain the underworld to a man who’d saved the planet dressed in lycra.

And then there was the rest of it. The history that he had no idea about - the history that was so deeply and almost impossibly tangled with his own… Well, Maria had approximately zero bright ideas on how to approach that one, and all the frustration that it was likely to fall to her to have to explain it. 

She sighs. 

It was times like this she wished that Fury wasn’t underground doing whatever mysterious intel work he’d deemed necessary when Romanoff had released all of SHIELD’s dirty little secrets back in 2014. The man had his faults, as did anyone, but he’d at least know how to handle Rogers. Steve was a good man, and that therein might lie the problem. Maria had dealt in the shadows for long enough to know that good men were almost always a liability. 

Swinging her legs back off the table and planting her feet firmly on the floor, she reaches for the phone sitting neatly on the left-hand side of her desk. Rustling her way through the drawer on the opposite side, Maria pulls out a scrappy bit of paper that has writing scrawled across from left to right. The woman squints at the scribble, other hand hovering over the handset as she punches in digits. 

Receiver held to one ear, Maria counts absentmindedly under her breath as the line hesitates for a moment or so, then begins the unfamiliar ring it makes when dialling internationally. She makes a quiet deal with herself that, if it hits nine, she’ll hang up and Riley can have this conversation in person. It’s not like the team doesn’t know where the Avengers are hiding out. 

Ex-Avengers, she reminds herself. 

He picks up on eight and a half, Maria’s index finger already poised over the switch hook. 

“Rogers.” 

She doesn’t wait for an answer before she continues, and nor does she bother to call him Captain. If the man at the other end of the line is surprised to hear her voice, he isn’t afforded the chance to express it. 

“So you dusted your first vamp. Congratulations. Although in some ways I’m surprised you’ve been around as long as you have and never encountered one before.”

Maria’s mildly impressed that he skips past the boring questions. The hows, whys and wherefores of her having his number, hearing from her after three years or her knowing what he’s been up to in the past day. But then, that’s what she’s always appreciated most about Steve. His ability to cut straight to the point. 

“A… Vamp?”

“Vampire,” Maria answers smoothly, already having anticipated the question coming her way. The man at the other end of the phone remains silent, and so she carries on without missing a beat. “The undead, Nosferatu, the cold ones. Dracula and his legion of minions. However you want to call it; they’re bloodthirsty, pointy-toothed and a good deal less sparkly than some sections of Hollywood would have you believe.”

“A vampire.” 

Rogers’ voice is flat, and Maria allows herself a small bittersweet smile. The memory of the way she’d learned about the underworld flashes through her mind. Riley, sweat beading his forehead as he gripped her shoulders, the pair of them splattered with demon guts, the blood of her unfortunate colleagues dripped down what remained of the canvas tents in the middle of the jungle. The low growl of his voice, the hurried explanation, the need to get her to understand before he could get them both out of the danger zone. 

“Yes, Steve, a vampire,” she says, patiently, even though the fingers of her left hand are tapping out a rough rhythm on the desk in front of her. Not expecting the man to accept this new world at the first. He may have been alive longer than anyone had a right to, he may have seen things as strange or stranger as anything she might now have to explain to him, but - as she had reason to know - for some reason, people had a hard time accepting fangs and bloodlust. 

At the other end of the phone line, crackling and rustling as it bounces from one unlicensed satellite to the next, piggy-backing for seconds here and there before it hits the battered burner phone she knew the man had carried for the best part of six months, Maria hears Steve let out a deep huff of breath that carried the remnants of what might have been laughter within it. 

She waits. 

“You know,” and his voice is thoughtful as he speaks, tinny and small-sounding through the phone line. “A month ago I’d’ve hung up on you, Agent Hill. Hell, a week ago. And not just because you’re calling me up to spin fairy tales. But this is just how SHIELD treats people, isn’t it? Forgotten and swept under the rug until you might be of some use.”

Maria ignores the bitter twist in the man’s voice, and pushes aside her private agreement. 

“This isn’t SHIELD business, Rogers,” she says instead, and that catches his attention. She can hear it in the abrupt silence that follows, the sharp absence of comment. Romanoff does it too, and Maria allows herself the briefest instant to wonder who learned from whom. “Believe me, this is something entirely else. And there’s someone you should probably meet. She’s - well, she’s unique. Even for your sort.”

“Last set of people I ‘had to meet’ turned out to be Nazis,” Steve returns flatly, but she’s been in the game long enough to be able to detect the note of underlying interest running through him as he says it. 

“Not Nazis,” Maria promises. “Not SHIELD, not HYDRA. This is… This is a whole something else.”

“Not sure I’m in the market for more trouble,” Steve answers sourly. 

“Really?” Maria bites, sitting forward in her chair abruptly, feet swinging off the hardwood desk and landing with a thump on the floor. “Because I could have sworn I was speaking to a man who sneaks around late at night just about hunting out any trouble he can get his hands on.”

Steve is silent at the end of the line, but she can practically hear the argument he’s just about holding back from unleashing. That, and the anger rumbling below his surface that he’s been spied on. Most people would apologise. Most people aren’t Maria. She has her reasons and, besides, she was taught by the best. 

“Listen, Steve,” she says instead. “We both know you’re a man who looks for a cause. We have one. It’s - it’s bigger than just vampires, but they’re as good a start as anything else. You want in, or no?”

He remains silent, and Maria gets the not so subtle hint that she’s being kept waiting as punishment. She rolls her eyes, because that move is Natasha, through and through. 

“Could use you, Rogers.” 

He sighs at the other end of the phone, and Maria can picture him hanging his head as she hears him exhale, heavy and slow. That dusty blond mop of hair, longer now than it’s ever been, curling at the ends as it twists its way past his ears and brushes the collar of the too-small t-shirt he’s packed himself into. 

“Vampires, then.” 

Maria does not allow herself to acknowledge that she’s released a tight and long-held breath when he speaks, and instead carries on smoothly as if she’d always known he’d want to hear the rest of the story. 

“Vampires, werewolves and ghosts.”

“Oh, my,” comes the drier-than-the-Sahara response. 

She grins briefly despite herself, before biting down hard enough on her lower lip that a stinging pain slices across her and stops the laughter from escaping her lungs. It’s not the right time. Some day, it will be, but today is not that day. Some other day will she laugh with Steve Rogers about his acerbic wit and the ridiculous events they’ve seen through together. Today there are more important things to impart. 

“We’re not in Kansas anymore,” Maria says instead, switching effortlessly into her default operative mode, the one she uses to impart information quickly and cleanly. “The demon world - some might call it an underworld - stretches further and is more developed than you could ever guess at, Steve. Some of them, even quite a few of them, are harmless. Or thereabouts, at least. The ones that aren’t, well, they could destroy everything we know.”

“Sounds like another day at the office.”

“I heard you’d resigned from that particular office.”

He sucks in his breath again, a long low sound that reverberates through the phone speaker as Maria sits in the cellar-come-office she’s made home over the past year. She can hear the slightest rumble to the edge of that intake that tells her there is some rueful laughter being held back firmly. She smiles. 

“I also heard you’d been moonlighting.”

“Heard? Or know?”

It’s phrased as a question most unnecessarily, for both parties. As such, Maria ignores it. 

“This is a fight that doesn’t end, Steve.” She says bluntly. “It’s been raging for centuries, and it’ll last a millenia.”

“Rousing.” Steve comments. “I see why Fury was the one to make the speeches.”

“Just telling it how it is. No illusions, no promises, no bullshit. The slayers-”

“The what now?” He interrupts, curiosity colouring his voice, and Maria can hear that she’s piqued his interest moreso with that one slip than almost anything else she’s told him. One corner of her mouth arcs up into a half-grin, and she wonders for a hot second how this will play out. 

“Slayers. Plural now, previously singular,” Maria explains shortly, all too aware that it’s hardly enough information at all, let alone to be considered an explanation. “They who are called upon to fight the creatures of the night, they alone in the darkness… I can’t remember the blurb now. There’s a whole book on it somewhere, if you’re really interested, but it’s a little out of date given current circumstance.”

“Slayers.” Steve repeats, slowly. “It’s a little…”

“A little...?” Maria prompts.

“A little on-the-nose, don’t you think?” 

“Says Captain America,” she snorts in response. 

“The Artist formally known as,” Steve corrects, and she does laugh at that, partly at the joke but mostly because she’s pretty sure he doesn’t actually get the joke himself. 

“So you’re in?” She asks, switching back to pursue the original topic. There’s a pause, one that stretches and stretches, so long in fact she’s half on her way to check the phone connection, thinking the tinny little phone line has finally given up the ghost. 

“The team is in,” Steve answers, finally, and with an air of resolution and no small amount of emphasis on the word ‘team’. “We’re a package deal, Agent Hill. All, or nothing.”

“Wouldn’t expect anything less,” Maria responds smoothly, missing no beats at all in her delivery, having anticipated it from the moment Riley called her in the middle of the night. Retired from the title though he may be, Rogers is no less a captain than he ever was. “We’ll need you in Prague, soonest. We’ll make contact again when you reach the city outskirts. I suggest you split up, travel at night. The usual precautions.”

“The usual precautions.” He agrees, sounding absent-minded as he speaks. 

“Good luck, Steve,” Maria says, guessing that his thoughts are with Wilson and the rest of the team, and just how it is that he’s going to be able to explain fangs, dust explosions and the sudden need to haul ass back to central Europe. 

“And you, Hill,” Rogers answers. “What are you going to be doing whilst we’re getting to you?”

“Me?” She asks, redundantly. “I’ve got another phone call to make.”


	7. Behind Enemy Lines

Bavaria, 1940

“I assure you, gentlemen, this is the only possible way of ensuring the successful rescue of Dr. Erskine. The only question that remains open is when the mission should commence.”

The words, delivered in a cut glass English accent, split across the company like a knife. The Colonel is able to practically see the feathers as they ruffle around him. The room is small, the men standing uniformed shoulder to uniformed shoulder as they cluster in close about his desk. 

Phillips deliberately screws the pen lid back onto the pen he holds with a maddening slowness, allowing the tension in the room between the young brunette and the assembled men to reach almost unbearable heights. He stares at the paperwork laid out in front of him, and does not meet her eyes. 

“Agent Carter,” he begins in the slow Southern drawl she’s come to know, although perhaps not necessarily to love. “At this point I’d consider telling you that I don’t believe MI5 loaned you to the SSR so much as shifted the problem internationally. That is, if I thought you’d take it as anything other than a compliment.”

At this, he pauses and his eyes flicker upwards but momentarily. He is met with a raised eyebrow that lets him know the girl is singularly unmoved by his comment. Her head tilts ever more defiantly the longer she stares back at him, and her jaw sets firmly. Phillips points his pen in her direction, making a jabbing motion in the air as he does so. 

“I can assure you, it is not.”

“Be that as it may, Colonel-”

“Be that as it may,” he speaks louder than she does, and with both a warning tone and a look that has her snapping the bright red of her mouth closed with a militant look tossed his way that tells him this is only a temporary reprieve from talking. “Agent Carter is correct.”

There’s a short outburst of protest from the gathered men at this, which he silences with one raised hand and a glower that crinkles his forehead even more so than it usually is. There is nothing he can do to wipe away the mutinous looks they toss Carter’s way, though he doubts the girl cares much in any case. 

“Unless, of course, any of you rabble think you’d look better in a serving girl’s dress?”

The silence is deafening. 

“I thought as much. Carter - tonight is as good as any, seeing as you’re so damn eager to risk your neck in the name of science.”

The men melt away, all hard looks in her direction and muttered comments, none of which are particularly complimentary. She remains, hands clasped behind her back, that pretty mouth that she routinely uses to cause trouble in his company set pursed. Phillips eases himself out of his chair, wincing slightly at the internal wheeze his lungs make, remembering a time when unbidden noises accompanying small movements was not part of his life. 

“Dismissed, Carter,” he says, pausing at her shoulder, the girl still looking back at his desk. Her head turns slightly, the neat set of her dark curls brushing the stripes on his shoulder as she moves. He looks ahead, his own hands clasped behind his back in a mirror of the stance she’s taken. 

“I do hope this Erskine is worth the trouble.”

“He is.” 

\-----------

Peggy gazes at herself in the cracked and stained mirror that hangs somewhat forlornly over the bathroom sink. The little electric bulb crackles above her head, fizzing quietly in the background as though it is protesting its role. She thinks that her eyes look darker than usual, a little more sunken into her face than a month or so ago. It’s been a hard couple of months for the SSR, and it’s been harder still to get rations to the front line. 

She has loosened her hair into soft waves, pinned back only at the sides in the manner of the local serving girls, for that is what she will be tonight. The bodice she’s begged from the unimpressed landlady is too tight, and pinches under the arms, but there’s little she can do about it now - and, besides, the pronounced curve it provides her breasts might do well to serve as a distraction from her face. 

She does not need the German officers to remember her. 

Intelligence tells them that Erskine is being kept in the basement cellar of Kastel Kaufmann, the imposing berg that towers over the small Bavarian town of Bad Weissee. In other times, Peggy might have liked to visit the place, all twisting cobbled streets and chocolate-box houses painted in pretty pastel colours. 

For now, it is merely a place in which she is sequestered, posing as a maid plucked from the local populace. Her Bavarian is more than passable, something she owes to her father and his thorough education system. That, and the Bavarian Slayer who passed just two years after the death of Moon Kyong-ja, slaughtered and left in the woods for the wolves to lick across her bones. 

The Council had acknowledged the death by making a note in the latest journal, then filing the leather-bound book in the appropriate shelf. Her Watcher had been called home, another despatched in his place to the new Slayer. 

Peggy’s gaze slips from the mirror to the crumpled letter in her left hand. Her father’s careful writing scrawled across every inch of the paper, instructing her in no uncertain terms to retrieve Abraham Erskine from the Nazi science division. At any cost.

She is certain that, despite his words, Harrison Carter does not intend ‘at any cost’ to mean his only daughter to dress as serving girl and infiltrate the castle, but there is no other option to be taken. Not one with any chance of success, at least. 

Erskine was known to the Council, but not one of them. Not officially, at any rate. He had been a resource for them, a man learned in the Hebrew histories as well as in the turning curve of science as it evolved rapidly in the new age. The Council eschewed science for the most part, preferring to rely - if they did have to at all - on the witchcraft and blood magic that had seen them through the ages. Peggy thought that, with the turn of the new century and the advances made from the last war and now this one, the Council would need to change its attitude - and fast. 

The Council was not for turning. 

The Council took sides only in the unearthly war, the one they considered waged between Heaven and the legions of Hell - they had little to no interest in the war that raged across the world, not in Adolf Hitler and his designs. Small men with big ideas, Harrison Carter had said, would always spring up and always had. History, so he said, was littered with them.

Hitler and his armies, indeed Churchill and his factions, were of no importance to the Council. 

It was this attitude Peggy was struggling with. 

The current Slayer, a girl named Shoshana, was imprisoned to the East. A work camp, so the Council had reported back, by the name of Auschwitz-Birkenau. A small town, otherwise of no significance, to the south of Poland. The camp had been constructed to hold prisoners of the Nazi regime, early in the year. It was said that some 5000 or so persons had been transported there in early June, for internment. Shoshana had been one of the first, too afraid of the consequences to her family to use her strength on mortal men. 

Peggy had seen one photograph of Shoshana, passed quickly across her father’s ancient wooden desk before he’d slipped it within the pages of a dossier folder. A young girl, as they invariably were, dark eyed and dark haired, not entirely unlike Peggy herself. A world of innocence about to break in front of her, the inheritance of generations to be passed to her, and her alone. Her Watcher, a stoic man named Cavendish, had travelled by steam train to meet the girl’s family in her small Polish village. 

That had been only 5 months ago, as the winter’s snows still lay heavily across the valleys, even in the south of Poland. The war had made it difficult for him to stay in enemy-occupied lands, and so Cavendish had abandoned his young charge. 

“She wanted to stay with her family,” he’d shrugged over a large glass of brandy, the expression on his face almost one of surprise, as though he couldn’t entirely understand the sentiment. He had been lounging against the library walls of the Carter family home. “I did offer to bring her back to England with me, at great personal risk, you understand - those German bastards are quite ruthless when pressed - but the girl wouldn’t hear a word of it unless I brought the whole damn clan along as well.”

“Nothing you could have done differently,” Harrison Carter murmured in response, and Peggy had slipped from the shadows into the corridor, shoulders shaking as she fought to calm the rage that bubbled up inside her. She’d forfeited the rest of her leave and travelled back as quickly as she had been able to do so, to where the SSR were stationed in Bavaria. 

She glances once more at the letter. Stamped from last week, and somehow having evaded the usually rigorous censorship of the British army - she detected the Council’s hand at work there - her father’s words were harsh in black ink against the crisp white paper. 

Bring him home. 

Peggy is unsure precisely what it is that is so special about this man, this Erskine, but she is too eager to finally be of use to question the command too much. This war, terrible as it undoubtedly is, has finally afforded her an opportunity denied to her by her father and his colleagues. The opportunity to fight - to matter. Peggy Carter is not destined to be a Slayer, as she had dreamed of night after night as a girl, but damn it she would matter. In whatever small way she is able to. 

One last look in the mirror has her smoothing the deep green skirt a final time, before she sweeps out of the door. 

\---------

The girl dips her head in deference as she clears the empty beer steins from the table. Schmidt and his men have eaten full to bursting - the discarded chicken bones, gravy-slick plates and dirty cutlery littering the hardwood table attest to that - and now they lounge lazy and bloated in armchairs with unlaced boots, trousers unbuttoned as they relax. 

Only Schmidt remains, still seated at the head of the table, and she clears steadily around him, piling up empty plates into a careful stack balanced in the crook of one arm as she moves. 

As she passes by him, reaching her hand out to the remains of his plate, he grips at her forearm with surprising speed and strength. He pulls her close to the table, jerking her toward him so that she can smell his hot breath, feel it against her cheek. The girl bites back the cry that threatens to escape her throat, swallowing it down and instead turning dark frightened eyes to the man in front of her. 

“Not for you,” he barks, eyes flickering to the half-eaten bread roll left on his plate, stewing in a puddle of thick gravy. “You understand?” 

She nods her head frantically, well trained enough not to try and pull back from his grip. Schmidt squeezes tight, fingers digging into the soft flesh of her forearm so deep that she is sure to have bruising in the morning. Tears sting at the corners of her eyes, unbidden but present anyway, called forth by the pain. 

With a sneer, he lets go abruptly and turns his head from her. The girl stumbles back a pace or so, the plates stacked into her arm wobbling badly. She inhales sharply, steadying the tower that threatens to fall. A moment passes, the crockery shudders into place and finally stills. She closes her eyes briefly, sending a small prayer of thanks heaven-ward. 

“Leave now.”

He does not turn his head to look at her, but she dips as low a curtsey as she dares with the pile of plates still held in her arms, and backs away slowly until she is through the archway and can knock the large wooden door shut with one heel. 

The sound of it shutting firmly resounds through the stone corridor, and she holds her breath for a moment, fearful of recrimination. After a minute, when nothing is forthcoming, Peggy breathes a sigh of relief and dumps the plates on a convenient side table. 

Pulling out the set of keys she’s swiped from Schmidt’s pocket, she drops to one knee and carefully locks the door to the banquet hall, as quietly as she is able to do so. The lock clicking into place is a sweeter sound than any she’s heard for some time, and Peggy allows herself a brief smile.

Schmidt only drinks from his own hip flask, so there was little she could do for him, but the other officers have drunk deeply all evening from the tankards she placed in front of them. The little vial nestled in her pocket is potent even in small doses, and Peggy emptied the whole lot into the beer barrell she’s been serving from all night. 

They’ll sleep like the dead. 

\-----------

“Dr. Erskine?”

The man huddled at the other end of the stone cell jerks fearfully at the sound of his name, and Peggy thinks perhaps she might have chosen better to speak in English, something that would mark her out as something other than the guards of Kastel Kaufmann. She tries again, switching back to her own language and keeping her voice low. 

“Miss?” 

His voice is rasping and hoarse as he responds in kind, and she hopes it is through lack of use, although even as the words flit across her mind the moon shifts and she can see the ugly scars across his arms and chest where his shirt hangs open. Peggy offers him a fleeting smile as she works at the lock, having slipped a long pin from her hair. The loose curls fall forward as she sucks her lower lip between her teeth, concentrating hard. 

Finally, after what seems an age, the lock clicks and the barred door swings open. 

“Quickly,” she says, gesturing to him from the doorway. “We must leave now, if there’s any hope to be had at all.”

He blinks at her, but shuffles to his feet, using the stone wall at his back as a prop. His beard is shaggy and grey, and she notices that one of the lenses in his glasses is cracked. He hurries to the doorway, shoes slipping on the flagstones slightly as he moves - perhaps more than he has moved in the last month or so. 

“Are you an angel?” He asks, wonderingly, pausing in the doorway, his English strong but heavily accented. Peggy does not answer, turning on her heel instead to lead the way back down the basement corridor, the full skirt of her serving girl dress swinging out around her as she walks. 

The little doctor stops sharp as he takes in the prone bodies of the two guards laid out on the flagstones. Peggy steps over first one, and then the other, taking little care to miss splayed fingers as she does so. 

“Are you coming?” She asks impatiently, looking back over one shoulder at him. 

“An angel, perhaps,” Erskine murmurs to himself, following her lead and stepping over the bodies of the men on the floor. “But one who belongs in the halls of Valhalla at the head of Odin’s guard.”

\----------

The servant’s entrance is, mercifully, clear. The SSR had heard rumours that the staff didn’t stay after hours, whether because they were required not to or simply did not care to stay, was not apparent. Peggy finds that she’s not much bothered by the motivation, only that it suits her purposes to pass unquestioned with the doctor. 

She thinks she can hear a dulled hammering noise from two floors up, as if of fists on wood. The little doctor glances at her questioningly, but the girl says nothing and merely pulls a cheap cloak from the pegs to drape over Erskine’s head and shoulders before kicking the door open hurriedly. 

“Quickly, now,” she hisses, almost pushing him out of the doorway and down the path, glancing over her shoulder. The man nods his head, more to himself than anything else, and picks up the pace. Peggy hurries after him, cursing under her breath as the heels of her shoes click against the stone, echoing far too loudly to her ears. 

They are almost at the end of the path when a shout pierces the night air. 

Peggy shoves Erskine forward and into the rough bush that borders the path before she spins on her heel. From one of the windows she can see a uniformed man hanging, too far away to see exactly which of the officers it is. She ducks and curses out loud as a shot grazes past her, ricocheting off the stone. 

She drops to one knee, pulling up the material of her skirts to thigh level. Fumbling for the gun strapped to her leg, Peggy ducks again as a bullet whistles past far too close for comfort, accompanied by a barrage of German. Looking up, the gun now in her right hand, she sees that her opponent has been joined by another, the pair of them jostling at the small window. 

Straightening, she sights the pistol and takes careful aim. 

She misses them - they’re too far away and the pistol pulls a little to the left - but the two shots fired in quick succession shatter the glass in the open window, bringing the shards down upon them which is distracting enough for her to spin and run, hauling Erskine up and out of the bush. 

Peggy has the doctor by the collar and they’re both breathing hard by the time they’ve reached the end of the lane where she’s grateful beyond belief to see the motor car waiting. Pulling the door open hurriedly she pushes the man into the backseat before following herself. 

“You know,” Phillips drawls slowly from the front seat and around a large cigar that’s filling the front with a cloying smoke she doesn’t so much smell as taste, so thick is it. “I really thought you’d be more careful with the man, considering how hard you fought to rescue him.”

Peggy shoots him a dark look from behind a curtain of hair, shoving it behind her ears with one hand as she sits up straight. 

“Just drive, will you?” 

“Well, I usually prefer to fly, but I make a habit of doing anything for a pretty girl with a gun,” comes the response, not from Phillips but instead the driver’s seat where sits a dark-haired young man with a pencil moustache. He tips her a wink over his shoulder and floors the accelerator. 

\---------

“Here,” she says, sitting down at the little table next to the doctor, and gently pushing across a large stein of beer and a plate of food. The candlelight flickers as she moves by it, wobbling until it stabilises, casting Peggy’s shadow onto the wall beside the table. “It’s not much, but it’s got to be better than whatever Schmidt was feeding you.”

“Such kindness,” Erskine comments, eyeing the plate briefly before pushing it away. Peggy blinks. The doctor, still wrapped in the cloak she’d thrown over him in the castle, sits back in his chair and fixes her with an appraising look. “Schmidt offered the same such kindnesses. For a time. Do you know why that was, Agent Carter?”

Peggy clears her throat and mirrors the doctor’s pose, sitting back in her chair and crossing her legs neatly at the ankle. If she is surprised that the man knows her name, she is sure not to show it on her face. 

“I presume because he wanted something from you.”

“A quick study as well as a quick shot,” Erskine answers. “Your father must be proud.”

That Peggy does react to, albeit with a mere flicker in the expression on her face. The doctor chuckles to himself, before leaning forward and resting his elbows on the table, an intent look upon his face. 

“I suspect your father and his fellows at the Council are desperately interested in my work, perhaps even as much as Johann Schmidt.”

“What is - what is your work?” Peggy asks, curiously. “What could the Council possibly want with a scientist?” Erskine sits back in his chair and rubs at his chin, feeling the beard that has grown there over the long months he has been kept at Kastel Kaufmann. 

“The Slayers,” he finally answers, voice quiet but steady in the small room. “I was - I have - created a solution. A way to put that strength, that speed and stamina, into any person.” 

Silence stretches between them, and Peggy finds that words will not come, for all the questions that instantly fill her mind. 

“But that’s magic,” she eventually offers, lamely. “The first Shamans, the elders of the first tribe who-”

“It is science, Agent Carter,” Erskine corrects gently. “Magic is, after all, only science that hasn’t yet been documented. And, in any case, this would mean - perhaps does mean - that the Slayer would not be alone in her generation.”

Peggy lets that information sink in, considering all the possibilities that Erskine’s revelation means. She understands, now, why Schmidt and the HYDRA faction were so keen to keep Erskine, why his research would be so important to them. A dark voice at the back of her mind hisses all sorts of questions as to why the Council were also so keen to retrieve the little doctor. 

At any cost. 

Her father’s words echo in the small space, unspoken but filling the room nevertheless, growing larger and larger until Peggy can barely think of anything but those three words. So simple, so innocuous - and yet, with such implications. She feels almost overwhelmed by it. She shakes her head to clear it, and fixes Erskine with a hard look. 

“So Schmidt wanted to use this, this science?”

Erskine shakes his head, eyes sad. 

“Serum. Schmidt has used the serum.”

“Used it? But Slayer strength, in a man who already wants to destroy the world-”

“My dear, I’m afraid that is not even the half of it,” Erskine looks up at her with regret. “Do you know why it is that the Slayer is but one in a generation?” When Peggy shakes her head in response, he continues. “The Slayer is supposed to be an amplified version of herself. Strength and speed yes, of course, but a Slayer needs more than that to fulfill her duties. She must be quick of mind, agile, fearless, strong not only in muscle and sinew but in character.”

Peggy nods, following the words but not quite yet fully understanding his meaning. 

“The Slayer is only more of herself when she comes into her destiny. And so works the serum, for it is derived wholly from the same source. The distilled demon blood, the essence of the very thing against which she is supposed to fight. A good person becomes great, a great person becomes exceptional.” 

Erskine pauses, his fingers steepled together and he looks over the point they make at the dark-haired girl sat across from him. 

“A bad person is made worse. A terrible person… It doesn’t bear thinking about.”

Peggy swallows, the implications of what the doctor is telling her sinking in. She lets out a long exhale of breath she hadn’t realised she’d been holding as he explained his serum. The pair sit in silence a moment or so longer, before she breaks it. 

“Take your serum to the Allies,” she says, sitting forward with a fire blazing in her dark eyes. Erskine’s eyebrows raise, and she stumbles on, the words dropping fast as she catches ahold of his hands in her own. “Take it to them, where it can be used against HYDRA. Find a good person - no, a great person - someone who will be exceptional after the serum.”

“Such people are not easily found,” Erskine says ruefully, although he does not pull his hands from where she grasps at them. 

“No,” Peggy admits. “But they do exist. And if they exist, they can be found.”


End file.
